What Is a Feminist Picture?

Over the past 50 years, the art-historical canon has come under an intense and overdue critique. Thanks to a sustained engagement with the pioneering contributions of women artists, its ideological underpinnings—masculinist, male, European—have been highlighted and scrutinized, and a number of urgent questions have emerged: How do we go about unsettling established art-historical narratives? Unfixing the canon? Activating new readings? Researching counterhistories? Expressing transnational synchronicities? Constructing resistance?

The discourse was forever changed by Linda Nochlin’s 1971 essay “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?,” which was published in ARTnews as part of the special issue “Women’s Liberation, Woman Artists, and Art History.” Nochlin questioned the validity of the very idea of greatness—of the stand-alone genius associated with male artists and masterpieces. She declined to refute the question in the essay’s title by proposing a series of equally great women artists, which would only reinforce existing hierarchies; rather, she meticulously identified the gender inequities—some obvious, some coded—embedded in the production and reception of art: in art academies, systems of patronage, ownership, museum collections and exhibitions, and the clichéd myth of the master.¹ Because of the rich scholarship and theories that emerged in response to Nochlin’s landmark argument, we now understand that the construction of a more scopic, inclusive, and transnational art history requires envisioning nonbinary models of cultural production, sexuality, gender performativity, interconnectedness, and collective intelligence.

What is a feminist picture? The category of “woman” has never been all-inclusive in the fight for societal change; even the movement to foster women’s creativity has failed to include all women. In Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism (1981), the social activist and cultural scholar bell hooks made a stark critique of mainstream first- and second-wave feminist narratives, pointing out their disregard for issues of race and class and their sidelining of women of color.² Other, more diverse forms of feminism have positioned themselves in opposition to hegemonic liberal feminism rather than as a part of it, amplifying and making visible the struggle against the forms of marginalization and dispossession that are endemic in white-supremacist society. The concept of intersectionality, developed at the end of the 1980s by the law professor and social theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw, provides a theoretical framework for understanding the ways in which social categorizations create overlapping and interdependent systems of discrimination.³ The imperious structure of patriarchy cannot be separated from other forms of oppression, including racism, heteronormativity, slavery, colonialism, and restrictions of citizenship. African-diasporic, queer, and postcolonial/Indigenous feminists have brought a change of perspective, calling for new critical appraisals of the specifics of gender politics within asymmetrical systems of power.⁴

The production, circulation, and presentation of images has been at the center of Louise Lawler’s sustained feminist analysis of power structures since the 1970s. As part of the Pictures Generation—a loosely knit group of artists who used mass media strategies to critically examine the functions and codes of representation—Lawler took photographs of other artists’ works in private collections, museums, storage spaces, and auction houses, subtly commenting on the sociological use and value of art. Lawler’s work draws on reception theory, which acknowledges that the meaning of an artwork shifts and morphs depending on who looks at it and the context of its display. In Sappho and Patriarch (1984), two sculptures are seen in close proximity, accompanied by a text panel that reads, “Is it the work, the location, or the stereotype that is the institution?” The image prompts us to think about the politics of space—about the canonical values and imbalances of power reinforced by museological display. Lawler reckons with the modes of address by which art seeks a rapport with its audiences and asks us to consider the art institution as a space of ideological construction, where identities and gender roles are constantly in play.

The intellectual history of mass media (like that of modern art) is grounded in the xenophobic and colonialist ideologies that have long informed Western knowledge production, so that Native Americans are now faced with the prospect of having to reclaim both their stolen land and their Indigenous identity. The artist Hulleah J. Tsinhnahjinnie, a member of the Diné, Semiole, and Muscogee Nations, shares with the Pictures Generation an interest in the way images circulate in popular culture, using reproducible technologies and strategies of appropriation to reframe ethnographic clichés. Vanna Brown, Azteca Style (1990), a photocollage from her Native Programming series, features a Hollywood image of an actress in Native American costume set into the screen of a Philco television set. The work’s title refers to Vanna White, the Wheel of Fortune star, here with her name—and, in this case, her ethnic signifier—altered; the television literally, as well as critically, reframes the kitsch portrayal of “Indianness.” Wary of the fixities of identity politics, Tsinhnahjinnie reclaims and liberates images of Native Americans from the fictions at the heart of the mass media industry.